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What Is Commensality? a Critical Discussion of an Expanding Research Field

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What Is Commensality? a Critical Discussion of an Expanding Research Field International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health Review What Is Commensality? A Critical Discussion of an Expanding Research Field Håkan Jönsson 1 , Maxime Michaud 2,* and Nicklas Neuman 3 1 Department of Food Technology, Engineering and Nutrition, Lund University, 221 00 Lund, Sweden; [email protected] 2 Institut Paul Bocuse Research Center, 69130 Ecully, France 3 Department of Food Studies, Nutrition and Dietetics, Uppsala University, 751 22 Uppsala, Sweden; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: Commensality (the act of eating together) is studied in a range of disciplines and often considered important for social communion, order, health and well-being, while simultaneously being understood as in decline (especially the family meal). However, such claims are also contested in various ways. In this paper, we discuss the expanding field of commensality research and critically reflect on the debates surrounding its social functions, including its role in public health. We illuminate the deep social and cultural significance of commensality, through time and space, and conclude that whether or not commensality is the preferred social form of eating for any given individual, it is difficult to escape its sociocultural desirability and idealization. As a cross-cultural phenomenon in both past, present, and future, we suggest that commensality deserves further research. This includes commensality as a research topic in itself and as an entry point to unveil different dimensions of social relations between people, as well as interactions between humans and material objects. Citation: Jönsson, H.; Michaud, M.; Neuman, N. What Is Commensality? Keywords: commensality; meal sharing; eating together A Critical Discussion of an Expanding Research Field. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 6235. https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18126235 1. Introduction Eating together is one of the most commonly shared practices among human beings, Academic Editor: Daniel J. Graham both across space and time. The remains of food around traces of fireplaces, the oldest fireplaces discovered as far back as about 800,000 years ago [1], reveal for how long we Received: 29 March 2021 can confidently say that human beings have been sharing food. In fact, food sharing is Accepted: 5 June 2021 described in evolutionary anthropology as a fundamental part of human evolution, as a Published: 9 June 2021 means of reciprocal cooperation, which we share with other primates [2,3]. Furthermore, from a bioarchaeological point of view, sharing food and partaking in collective meals have Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral been analyzed as acts that connect the human being as a biological organism to a social with regard to jurisdictional claims in person [4]. Understood in this way, eating together makes up a fundamental part of our published maps and institutional affil- social nature. iations. In social sciences and humanities, commensality is commonly used as a scientific concept for eating together. However, despite the wide usage of this term, especially in anthropology and sociology, its meaning remains a subject of debate. Does it mean sharing the food? The table? The place? The moment? Maybe the etymology of the term can Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. help us answer this question. The most common stated origin is the word commensalis, Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. which appears in medieval Latin. It is formed with the prefix com-, used for something This article is an open access article shared among several persons, followed by two possible suffixes. One option would be distributed under the terms and mensa, which, here, would designate a table used for food. So, in that sense, commensality conditions of the Creative Commons is first and foremost a matter of sharing the table and, thus, the place and the central Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// mensalis creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ material object. However, the suffix could also be , designating what is on the 4.0/). mensa. In this sense, commensality is more about sharing the food itself. Yet another option, Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 6235. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18126235 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 6235 2 of 17 never explored as far as we know, would derive the term commensality from the medieval term commensalia, which designates the common symbola (financial contribution to a meal) left on the mensa [5] (p. 447). Commensality could therefore also be more about sharing the cost of a meal than the meal itself. This etymological digression demonstrates the complexity of the concept. However, if that was not enough, an extra layer of confusion is added when juxtaposing the term with others, such as conviviality, which is more about the friendly and enjoyable aspect of being together, or community, which designates a group of people sharing characteristics or interests. In this paper, we followed the understanding of commensality as eating together, with or without any specific connection to a table. We use it both as a descriptive term (what people do) and as an analytical term (its social functions). We explore the complexity of commensality by critically reviewing different ways it has been used in social and human sciences, the different conditions it requires, and the different forms it can take. We will provide a number of examples from different epochs and geographical areas. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive overview or “The history of commensality”. The given examples are used to ground a critical discussion of some of the key aspects of commensality research, which will allow us to (1) highlight different approaches and debates within this expanding research field, and (2) point to themes and concepts deserving further attention. Moreover, when we talk about the field as expanding, we are not referring to the quantitative increase of publications—which is a fact of almost all scientific fields—but for the diversification of the concept into a wide range of disciplines and research domains. 2. Main Directions in Commensality Research in Social and Human Sciences The role of shared meals as a symbol of trust (or betrayal), social communion, and rea- soned discourse is abundant in philosophical and theological writings, as well as in the arts. Examples are Plato’s Symposium, the last supper of Jesus in the New Testament and the Knights of the Round Table. In the early 1900s, foodways as a marker of social classification and cultural grammar grew, especially among anthropologists (e.g., Mauss, Lévi Strauss, and Douglas). Here, the main argument, expressed in different ways, was that the way we engage with food, as in rituals and routines, says something more profoundly about the structure of humanity and cultures as such. Moreover, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas elaborated on the democratizing function of 18th century London coffee houses [6]. To Habermas, they exemplified a venue of the modern public sphere, with potential for organization, social participation, and democratic discourse. The product as such, the coffee, is not in focus, however, but rather the potential inherent in the social occasion made possible through drinking it with others in public. A history of commensality research may begin with Georg Simmel’s “Sociology of the Meal” [7], in which he argues for the meal as a site in which the cultural and the natural coincide. The meal is, at the same time, an individualistic act and one that is socially shared and regulated. In fact, the very naturalness of eating, something every human being must do, is precisely what makes it so fundamentally social to Simmel. In the late 1970s, Claude Fischler laid the first cornerstone to a still ongoing systematic theorization of the social function of sharing meals. Fischler [8] claimed that, in Western societies, “meals are being increasingly eroded by or reduced to snacks. Eating is becoming less of a social, and more of a strictly individual, practice.” In such societies, he further suggested, shared rules and norms associated with food (what he calls gastronomy) were eroding. He called this gastro-anomie, a concept rooted in Durkheim’s theory of anomie—a societal condition of guiding norms in decline, in which the individual’s belief system is incongruent with that of the community. A particular gastro-anomie, then, is when the com- munity’s gastronomy is not in line with the individual’s. This, Fischler argued, has negative effects such as “nutritional disorders” [8], by which he seems to mean both psychological anxieties and physiological health effects. It is, in other words, an argument about how food becomes a means of social integration, whereby the corrosion of gastronomy (rules Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 6235 3 of 17 and norms associated with food)—most clearly manifested in the (supposed) decline of shared meals—can be traced in society’s pathologies. Fischler would then set forth a research program of investigating the seemingly universal traits of food and sociality, as well as the culture-specific differences, for many years. In 2011, many of his arguments from years of scholarship culminated in a paper that places commensality at the very center of human culture [9]. He even mentions the differences in prevalence of obesity and associated disorders in France and Italy compared to the United States, suggesting that the diverse cultures of commensality may explain why these differences exist. Due to a reduction of food to mere nutrients and the emphasis on individual choice, the argument goes, eating lacks social regulation in countries such as the United States. Such regulation, through norms of appropriate behavior, is then suggested to exert social control “upon eating behaviour and plays an important part in setting amounts consumed by individuals” [9].
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